![]() Marcus’s first guest is Lara, a Russian widow who has traveled from St. After the attacks of 9/11, Marcus opens his home to several people who find themselves trapped in the area. The building is a tomb where culture now banned by the Taliban has been buried: books are hidden by being nailed to the ceiling, posters of artworks peek out from under the whitewash on the walls, and pomegranate, acacia, and aloe vera trees bloom. Now, Marcus lives in a former perfume factory where he worked for a while. Marcus and Qatrina had a daughter, Zameen, who gave birth to a son after a love affair with an American, and who went missing during the invasion of Soviet forces in the 1980s. As punishment, Marcus’s hand was cut off in a brutally clinical procedure that Qatrina was forced to preside over. After the fundamentalists came to power, Marcus and Quatrina’s marriage was declared illegal and adulterous. For a long time, as a Muslim convert, he and his outspoken Afghani wife, Qatrina, tried to proselytize a progressive and inclusive version of Islam, a relatively successful endeavor until the rise of the Taliban. Marcus Caldwell is an elderly English expatriate doctor who has lived in Afghanistan for many years. Although the stories of the novel’s characters are intertwined, this summary will discuss each separately for the sake of clarity. Critics praise Aslam’s lyrical language and moving sense of aesthetics. Published in 2008, the novel uses the stories of its characters to contrast the roots of the problems in Afghanistan with the hope that “family bonds, common humanity, and the rich cultural heritage of this country can somehow rise above the hate of various factions threatening its destruction.” Characters are connected through love, trauma, and physical and psychic wounds-all caused by the pain of endless war. ![]() In his third novel, The Wasted Vigil, author Nadeem Aslam paints a portrait of thirty years in modern-day Afghanistan, told through the stories of several different people who come together in a lake house near the Tora Bora caves where Osama bin Laden managed to evade US forces.
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